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The lessons of the Permian-Triassic massacre are "directly applicable to the present," said John Isbell, a geoscientist at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. He said the world today is in danger of exceeding a CO2 "threshold" that could set off an environmental upheaval as great as the one 251 million years ago.

Clip Source: www.chron.com

An estimated 95 percent of all marine species and up to 85 percent of land creatures perished, according to Peter Ward, a paleobiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Scientists call it "The Great Dying." Life took millions of years to recover.

Scientific sleuths, however, now think they're making progress toward pinning down what caused the extinction of most plants and animals on Earth some 251 million years ago.

The perpetrator wasn't an asteroid or comet, like the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago and inspired movies such as Deep Impact and Armageddon.

Instead, it was a cascade of events that began with a monstrous outpouring of hot, reeking lava in Siberia. Repeated floods of lava released massive amounts of carbon dioxide, which produced a runaway greenhouse effect, oxygen-starved oceans and a poisoned atmosphere.

Tags: earth, mass extinction, carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases, atmosphere, geology, science

A Thousand Drops of Light - wonderful photos...

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 06:07:53 GMT

clipped by: einbar
clipper's remarks: To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

(William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence")

Clip Source: www.flickr.com

I like to go out to my garden after a rain and look around at whatever is blooming and discover natural teeny-tiny views of it through nearby drops.

Clip Source: www.flickr.com

You just can’t control where drops will form

Clip Source: www.flickr.com

The physics of it all, is that when water forms a drop, it no longer reflects back what is in front of it, but acts as a lens and refracts what is behind it

Clip Source: www.flickr.com

If you still don’t think water drop shots are real, just go out after a rain and hold a brightly colored piece of paper behind some drops and you will see the drops take on the color.

Clip Source: www.flickr.com

The "hearts" inside these water drops are refractions of some coral bells

Clip Source: www.flickr.com

I like the focus of the petals in both the background and refraction in the drop.

Clip Source: www.flickr.com

teeny-weeny perspective

Clip Source: www.flickr.com

The wonderful cool crisp autum days are approaching fast, so I thought I better try one more water drop shot after the last hot humid rain. The sun was out and bright and created a glare on the edge of the drops, but it also lit up the yellow nicely.

Clip Source: www.flickr.com

Speaking whales

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 08:46:43 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: Uplifting is on its way...
I wonder when will us humans learn some things from the whales?

Clip Source: current.com

Japanese scientists teach whale to talk

Scientists in Japan have given a beluga whale a vocabulary of three words, the first time a marine creature has been able to link a sound to an object and then repeat the sound as a 'word'.

"Right now Nack only knows three words, but we are working on the whale recognising different people and giving them a sound as well.

After that, we want to teach it to express likes and dislikes, something that is interesting instead of boring, and be able to say if something is painful," he said.

Professor Murayama said the breakthrough is the first conversation with a cetacean and that he hoped it might lead to humans and whales exchanging greetings in the not-too-distant future.

Tags: whales, intelligence, language

Burying Alive Three Teenage Girls is A CRIME, you morons!

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 14:01:11 GMT

clipped by: arifsali
clipper's remarks: The fact that this guy (who is defending such a crime under the guise of tribal custom) is in the government, is despicable.

Clip Source: www.dawn.com

ISLAMABAD, Aug 29: Balochistan Senator Sardar Israrullah Zehri stunned the upper house on Friday when he defended the recent incident of burying alive three teenage girls and two women in his province, saying it was part of “our tribal custom.”

Senator Bibi Yasmin Shah of the PML-Q raised the issue citing a newspaper report that the girls, three of them aged between 16 and 18 years, had been buried alive a month ago for wishing to marry of their own will.

The barbaric incident took place in a remote village of Jafarabad district and a PPP minister and some other influential people were reported to have been involved. The report accused the provincial government of trying to hush up the issue.

Ms Shah said that the hapless girls and the women were first shot in the name of honour and then buried while they were alive. She also said that no criminal had been arrested so far.

Tags: pakistan, crime, honor killing

The Uninsured are Dying

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 03:31:59 GMT

clipped by: Imnclady
clipper's remarks: Who says it isn't hurting anyone to be without health insurance....not I...it makes sense to put off check ups when you don't have the money to pay or to wait as long as you can hoping you feel better when you get sick...They know it is hurting us, They did a Study on on it.

So how can we ignore the truth?

Clip Source: www.dailykos.com

Conservative Policy Advisor Steps In It On Health Care

Studies estimate that there are about 22,000 deaths per year due to lack of health insurance. There are 11 million Americans with chronic physical illnesses like heart disease, diabetes and asthma are not getting the medical care they need because they don’t have health insurance. The uninsured have higher rates of stroke and cardiovascular disease deaths. The American Cancer Society found that uninsured cancer patients are nearly twice as likely to die within five years as those with private coverage. Overall, the United States has the highest rate of so-called "amenable" mortality among 19 OECD countries; that's 101,000 fewer deaths per year if we were as good as the average of the top three.

For another, as Ezra Klein notes, this is the equivalent of Phil Gramm calling anyone concerned about the economy a bunch of whiners. Why? Because health care access isn't a McCain concern.

Clip Source: images.dailykos.com

Tags: healthcare, government, death, research, study

Synthesis or Sinthesis?

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 19:23:44 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: When REligion turns to eVOLUTION we may call it REVOLUTION

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Rabbis and Christian leaders say that Darwin's theory of evolution is compatible with faith

The Clergy Letter Project, which aims to demonstrate that using the Bible as your moral compass is not inconsistent with an acceptance of evolution by natural selection, is extending its call to the Jewish community.

We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests.

The equivalent letter from American rabbis has 107 signatories to date. It states:

As rabbis from various branches of Judaism, we the undersigned, urge public school boards to affirm their commitment to the teaching of the science of evolution

environment which is supposed to be free of such indoctrination

Tags: evolution, religion, synthesis

Gizbert predicts Palin with withdraw

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 21:41:46 GMT

clipped by: masbury
clipper's remarks: For the vetting is just now beginning. McCain offered her a job he shouldn't have offered, and she'll be the one hurt by it.

Clip Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Allow me to predict that, within the next week or so, Sarah Palin will withdraw from the Republican ticket.

When she pulls out, Ms. Palin will say that she was wrong to accept John McCain's offer

It is becoming increasingly clear that Sarah Palin is a victim of the failure of the McCain campaign to properly vet her as a candidate.

Had McCain's people done the diligence, they would have known her home state's newspapers don't just question Palin's qualifications for the job, they deride them.

They would have realized that the troopergate story is real and will prove damaging.

Any investigators worth their salt would have concluded that Palin actually supported Alaska's bridge to nowhere, before she opposed it

And they would have heard that sound file of the incident with the talk radio hosts, in which Palin laughs when a political opponent of hers, a recovering cancer patient, was called a bitch and a cancer

And you know there's more coming, because the real vetting has just begun.

Tags: mccain, palin

USA minus Alaska

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 17:03:38 GMT

clipped by: AtlLiberal
clipper's remarks: If all you look at is Fox Noise or read is The Washington Times then you may have missed this tidbit. It stands as yet another example in a growing list of examples of poor choices that McCain has recently made.

Clip Source: www.dailykos.com

Recapping Palin's Secession Scandal

If you spent yesterday at a Labor Day picnic rather than at the computer, you missed the story that broke here regarding Sarah Palin's 1990s membership in the Alaskan Independence Party (AIP).

Note I said Independence not Independent. It's not just an "independent" party--it is a party whose explicit goal is to have a vote on Alaskan independence.

As user Liz Arnett first informed us yesterday morning, the AIP is a political party in Alaska whose motto is "Alaska First." It's goal is to have a vote on Alaska's state status so that Alaskans may decide whether the state should secede, become a territory, become a commonwealth, or remain a state.

Yesterday night, it was is confirmed that Sarah Palin and her husband were members of the AIP at least in 1994. Indeed, Palin reportedly attended the AIP convention.

Tags: politics, mccain, alaska, palin